Sachin Jaiswal firmly believes in technology and its power to build businesses at scale. This motivated him to co-found Niki.ai in 2015. This conversational commerce platform aims to make online purchases simple and easy.

According to Jaiswal, the technology sector is going through a rapid pace of innovation, which can be attributed partly to the relatively low cost of innovation as compared to traditional industries. He sees big opportunities in the areas of artificial intelligence and blockchain and believes that most of the innovations that the world will see in future will take place in these areas.

That said, heading a tech start-up is not easy. “Given the relatively new technology we are working on, the challenge is multi-fold. Like with all new technology, one obvious challenge is to ensure that that the system is stable and the error rate is within acceptable limits. Of course, getting users to adopt this technology is a big challenge,” says Jaiswal.

In his current role, Jaiswal oversees the entire product strategy of the company, leading product design, UX and the product roadmap. In fact, one of his most memorable as­s­ignments revolves around th­­ese core capabilities. “We had to build the UX for a conversational AI platform. Since we were the first players in the space to work on this technology, there were very little ben­ch­­marks available. So we had to design it from scratch. It is a great validation that most of what we built in the first cut is still used and has, in fact, been adopted by some of the biggest players in the industry.”

As CEO, Jaiswal strives to keep the team members ali­gned with the larger vision of the company while guiding them in meeting their short-term goals. He does not like to micro manage people. Instead, he believes in getting good pe­o­­­ple on board and giving th­em enough freedom to steer their ship towards a common goal.

Jaiswal is an engineer by qu­alification. After graduating from IIT Kharagpur, he work­ed with Oracle for a year as a product manager and built da­ta-driven products. Later, he co-founded a data an­alytics start-up, Innovaccer, which required him to juggle different roles – operations, bu­­si­ness development, sales and marketing, product strategy, etc.

Jaiswal’s  family comprises his parents, his brother and sister-in-law, and his wife. “We come from a very humble background and my family is still struggling to keep pace with technology,” he says. To un­wind, Jaiswal likes to binge-watch movies and TV series, or occasionally go to a quiet beach and read.